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Twitter Guide

This Twitter Guide is intended to serve as a resource for public relations and communications professionals learning about microblogging (also called microsharing) platforms. If you have any questions, share them with me on Twitter .

Desktop Tools for Updating TwitterTweetDeck is my favorite desktop Twitter application. You can organize your followers into groups, allowing easy visualizations for your community.Twhirl is another great desktop app, especially if you have want to update FriendFeed and Twitter from the same place.

90+ URL Shortening Services (via Mashable)Twitter Fan Wiki includes over 100 applications for using Twitter via your desktop, adding images, finding statistics and more. Only go here if you want to be overwhelmTwitter Karma lets you see which of your Twitter followers are following you in return.Qwitter alerts you when any of your followers stop following you.Twubble searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow.Twitterholic shows you the top 100 Twitter users.Xefer indicates what time of day a person updates Twitter his/her Twitter status.StrawPollNow is an easy way to take a quick poll of your Twitter followers.TwitStamp allows you to post your Twitter status on blogs, forums, websites… wherever.Twist is useful for seeing trends in Twitter.

Twitter DirectoriesJust Tweet It is another directory where you can list yourself by category.Twitdir is an awesome Twitter user directory.Twellow is a directory of Twitter users by category.Social Brand Index has a list of brands with a Twitter presence.Twitter Packs is a place to get a starting idea of who on Twitter posts about what.

Other Microblogging PlatformsEdmondo is for education.Yammer is for companies.Present.lyPrologue is an open-source "Twitter-like" application from the creators of WordPress.Socialcast helps employees communicate more effectively by creating private, online communities for businesses of all sizes.Headmix helps with internal "employee knowledge discovery."

Following Conversation ThreadsTwemes follows public Twitter tweets that start with a # character.Quotably lets you view and reply to Twitter conversations as threaded discussions.

StatisticsTweetStats examines your Twitter behavior and shares the resulting statistics in a graphical way.Tweet Volume illustrates in brightly colored bars the number of times a keyword has been used in a certain amount of time.